Cory Doctorow

But it doesn't work.

It doesn't work until you get a service call and pay $200 for someone to show up and type the unlock code into your tractor's keyboard.

Your printer company says, we don't like it when you use third party ink.

And so we're going to block third-party ink installation.

Once we do that, we're going to charge you more for the ink that comes from HP or Epson or whatever.

It's not that your printer can't run that program.

It's that your printer has been designed...

To reject that program, to say no, ink's now $10,000 a gallon.

It's the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a special license.

It costs more to print your grocery list than it would if you printed it with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion.

Tim Cook in 2019 wrote a letter to his investors at the start of the year where he said our biggest risk

is that our customers repair phones instead of buying new ones, that they like their phones, they work fine.

And so when they break, they don't just get a new one.

Apple uniquely among manufacturers, when you trade a phone in, sends it to be shredded so that the parts can't be harvested to be used in a repair.

And if you're like a bored grad student with an electron tunneling microscope, you can just like have at it.

Right.

They passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In Section 1201, it says it is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine to tamper with or expose weaknesses in or discuss weaknesses of a digital lock.

We're getting somewhere with these state right to repair bills.

So it's really going well, including Texas, including legislatures that have, you know, consider pretty friendly to big business are still passing repair laws.